An Interview by Peg Hill of Northern Stars magazine (kindly found by Felicity)

David Keeley on a High Note

By Peg Hill

Over the telephone line from Stratford, Ont., David Keeley starts singing.

He has explained that he was told by the media person at the Stratford Festival that the woman who was going to interview him was named Peggy Hill, “and I said (starts singing): `Mary Hill, used to hang out in Cherry Hill Park,' remember that?”

I go through the list of songs that have been sung to me over the years: Cherry Hill Park, Peggy Sue, Peg. He throws in Peg of My Heart. Yeah, heard that one too. He isn't familiar with the TV show King of the Hill so he doesn't realize a cartoon character shares my name, for which I have heard enough jokes already.

For the next year, Keeley is putting his strong singing voice to work rocking the Royal Alexandra theatre in Toronto with ABBA tunes. A new cast of Mamma Mia! took over the terrifically successful show on Nov. 7, 2000 while the original cast goes on tour in the U.S.

Keeley wasn't sure about doing the show at first. “I remember thinking `ABBA? I don't know about ABBA.' I wasn't a huge fan when I got the contract. You know, I like the songs. But we sat around on the first day in the rehearsal hall and we just listened to ABBA for the whole morning ... By the end of it, everyone's tapping their foot and smiling and laughing.

“They understood something about rhythm and beat and the tune of a song. Not all of the songs are upbeat. Some of them are heartbreak tunes, but their treatment of them is infectious. And it's a real treat to sing them. ... It's a romp. I'm having a blast. I haven't laughed this much in a rehearsal in my life. Hopefully that will carry through to the audience.”

Mamma Mia's plot is that a woman in her 40s is living on a Greek island. Her daughter, in her 20s, is going to get married. But the daughter doesn't know who her father is. She finds her mother's diary, which mentions three names of men dating back 21 years. Assuming one of the men must be her father, she invites all three of them to the wedding, unbeknownst to her mother. “Around that story, all these ABBA tunes are thrown in. And it works.” Keeley plays Sam, one of the three men.

PLAYED HORATIO TO GROSS'S HAMLET

Keeley was asked to audition for the original Mamma Mia! cast but he took the role of Horatio at the Stratford Festival instead. He also understudied his friend and singing partner Paul Gross as Hamlet. He had hoped to take on the starring role at least once this past season, but he says because of Gross's star stature the festival would not allow him to put it in his contract.

“When I was doing Richard III years and years ago with Colm Feore, Scott Wentworth was understudying Colm and he had it in his contract to go on twice. It's a common thing,” Keeley explains.

He consoles himself that he did get to play Hamlet in rehearsal. “I did get to do it. No, there wasn't an audience, but I did get to do it and that was a rush. That was great.”

This wasn't Keeley's first run with Hamlet, though. In the 80s he was cast as Cladius in a production in Edmonton that starred Joe Ziegler, who directed the latest Stratford version. To look a little older for the part, he grew a beard but still played it as a young man. “There's nothing in the play that states he has to be an old man. He's Hamlet's uncle. Uncle can be the same age.

“It set up a dynamic between Cladius and Gertrude that is very rarely investigated in the sense that she wasn't in on the murder but he's this young, virile and attractive guy. It set up the sexual thing a lot more than having her marry some old guy.”

Keeley talks about his past roles with great enthusiasm, whether or not they were well received by critics. He cites playing De Flores in The Changeling at Stratford as a great memory. But I remind him that reviewers savaged the 1989 production. “Absolutely. Absolutely,” he agrees. “They tore us apart. And rightly so. It was a terrible production. The only reason I say it as being a memory was because it was my first big part.”

A year before The Changeling, Keeley appeared at the National Arts Centre and other theatres across the country opposite Karen Kain as the Prince in Snow White. A couple of years later he stepped into Robert Lepage's production of Romeo and Juliet at Stratford after an actor was injured. “One of the craziest things I ever did,” he says of the play that included car crashes and street brawls.

By the early 90s he was looking to get out of musicals so that he wouldn't be typecast. “At that point, I had done a lot of musicals and you tend to get pigeon-holed in this country as to what you're going to do. If you start out doing musicals, you're going to be doing musicals for the rest of your life unless you really make a concerted effort to get out of it.

“At that point I just wanted to become an actor and get out of the musical theatre end of it. And I did. ... Then I wanted to do film and TV and I had to make a concerted effort to break into that. And I did quite well at that for a couple of years.

“Now I'm kinda at a point where I've pretty much done everything in the business other than a major blockbuster Hollywood movie. ... I feel like I'm at a real place of ease where I don't feel like I'm struggling to have to prove anything to anybody ... I just feel like it's a choice of whatever comes along.”

“NEVER LOOKED BACK” AFTER GOING TO STRATFORD

He adds that his family is his main priority now in choosing parts. Married for 12 years, he has two children, an 11-year-old boy and a girl, age 9. Keeley has for many years called Stratford home but was born in Sarnia, Ont., on April 21, 1961. His family moved to London, Ont., when he was two and he grew up there.

In 1981, Keeley decided to be a film actor but the notion didn't last long. “Three of us got into a truck and drove to Los Angeles and slept on the beach. Literally, we were there for four or five days. ... I didn't even make it into LA. We just hung out in Malibu being silly young men.” A writers' strike meant there wasn't any work available so he made his way to Vancouver where he sang in bars and drifted into theatre. In 1984 he went to Stratford “and never looked back”.

It was also in the early 1980s that Keeley met Gross. Gross and Keeley's wife to be, Laura, were in Toronto writing a musical called Thunder Perfect Mind. He had just met Laura. Gross had a rock band a couple of years later that Keeley would sing in. “Then we kind of lost touch. It was more of an acquaintance back then. We didn't really hang out. We'd have beers and sing in the band but that was about it.”

“And then I got to know him a bit when I was doing Hamlet the first time out in Edmonton because his wife Martha was in the show. And we hung out a bit then. ...”

Gross went to Nashville to do a film and came back saying he had a couple of country tunes “and I said I've got a couple of tunes and we started writing songs and that's what really brought us together, was the song writing and the playing. ... and we've had so much fun with it. We've been all over the world (promoting their first CD Two Houses). ... That's what really cemented the friendship. It's been great.”

Keeley and Gross have a second CD that is expected to be released in January, 2001 and is tentatively called Love and Carnage. Keeley is still in awe of the whole experience. “I never dreamt that I would have a CD of my own songs. This is so far beyond anything I ever expected. ...”

“The most amazing thing to me is the music, how profoundly people are moved by our music. I didn't see it coming. I don't understand it (but) it's really nice.”

“I'M ON AN ABSOLUTE HIGH”

Most of the attention that the first CD garnered was a result of Gross's high profile as the star of the former television show Due South. And Keeley just spent a season understudying for him. The inevitable question is, does he feel he's a bit in Gross's shadow? Absolutely not, he says. “You know, I think a lot of the attention I have garnered is because of Paul but we set this music thing as an absolute duo. ... I don't feel I'm in his shadow. If anything it's helped my career and it's been fun. It's a perception. To me, I'm not in his shadow. To me, we've done this music thing together. He wouldn't have done it on his own and I wouldn't have done it on my own.”

As for playing Gross's understudy, it “was absolutely my choice.” Gross asked him to play Horatio, Keeley asked how he felt about him understudying. “For me, it wasn't to understudy Paul. It was to get the chance to get Hamlet in my head ... and to actually speak those lines and to learn it and to live it.” It's wrong to have the perception “that I was hanging on to his coattails or anything.”

Fame is not what interests Keeley. “A lot of people in the business strive to be famous. But you can be famous by shooting somebody. ... I just want to act. I just want to sing, I want to entertain people. I want to enlighten people through Shakespeare and I want to make people laugh doing Mamma Mia.”

Keeley is aware of the highs and lows of the entertainment business and is enjoying his accomplishments this year. “I just pinch myself. ... Last year I was on a really bad low. I didn't work for about eight or nine months and it was really tough. I just couldn't get a gig to save my life. I was doing auditions for film and TV and nothing was coming through ... you take the good with the bad. And right now ... I'm on an absolute high ... life's pretty good right now.”

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Please turn to page 3 for "At the Stage Door"

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